Students (learners) are increasingly engaging in online education activities. Students taking online education courses may do so for various reasons (e.g., professional reasons, lifelong interests in learning, etc.), and invest significant effort into completing coursework (e.g., assignments, exams, etc.) in order to complete a course. An online education course may be provided to students over network connections or the Internet by an education course provider. For example, an online course provider may have access to, or create, course materials or resources for an online education course on a cloud computing platform. The online course provider may serve the course materials to the students as web pages on network or Internet-connected client communication devices.
Entire education courses with structured programs (e.g., including a series of lectures, demonstrations, quizzes and tests, etc.) can be made available online to students from the cloud computing platform. The students may receive the online education course content (e.g., video) on a computing device (e.g., desktop, laptop, tablets, a mobile phone, a smartphone, a radio transceiver, a telephone, a mobile computing device, etc.), which may have a variety of technical capabilities (e.g., internet connections, input/output devices, audio or video capabilities, display size, etc.).
When a large number (e.g., hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands) of students enroll, and participate, in the same online education course, the course may be known as a MOOC. MOOCs include course materials on various media such as text documents, audio, and video that contain the course content. Students follow a protocol for studying the course content in order to master the subject matter of a course. The students evaluate their mastery of the subject matter through tests, homework, and other projects.